Congo Should Get Funding For Its Rainforests, President Says

(Bloomberg) -- Congo President Felix Tshisekedi said his country deserves more funding to protect its tropical rainforests and reiterated a pledge to provide electricity to more than half of the population.

Tshisekedi, 56, has ruled the Democratic Republic of Congo since January in partnership with his predecessor Joseph Kabila, whose allies control both chambers of parliament. One of the world’s least developed countries, Congo is also one of the poorest in Africa despite its huge cobalt and copper reserves.

In his first speech to a gathering of world leaders at the United Nations, Tshisekedi on Thursday outlined some of his policy plans and said the international community should contribute more money to help Congo preserve its rainforest, the second-largest in the world after the Amazon.

“In Africa, nature has made my country the depository of 47% of the continent’s forests,” he said. “It’s incomprehensible that the forests of the Congo Basin, the best conserved in the world, capture only 1% of available financing.”

Tree Cover Lost

Congo lost more than 13 million hectares (32 million acres) of tree cover between 2001 and 2018 due to farming, logging, road construction and mining, according to Global Forest Watch. The central African nation of Gabon this week became the first African country to be rewarded for its efforts to stem deforestation with a $150 million grant.

Congo’s government will boost spending on electricity supply, education and health care, he said. Congo is among African countries with the lowest proportion of people having access to electricity, according to the World Bank.

“We can through aggressive investments and an attractive policy for the protection of these investments pass from less than 10% electrification currently to 60% in the next 10 years,” he said.

Spending on education will increase to 20% of the state budget from 8% currently, he said.

While state budgets approved by parliament in recent years have amounted to about $6 billion annually, actual public expenditure has been considerably smaller due to weak revenue mobilization. Raising significantly more money to spend on Congo’s population “is imperative to finance acute development and social needs,” the International Monetary Fund said this month.

To contact the reporter on this story: William Clowes in Kinshasa at wclowes@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Paul Richardson at pmrichardson@bloomberg.net, Pauline Bax, Jacqueline Mackenzie

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